Flashing your BIOS EEPROM chip has gotten a lot easier and safer over the years as we have seen companies develop several strategies to prevent a bad flash from happening and bricking whatever it was you were trying to update. Those who have been bitten several times over the years tend not to trust these features and some components, such as your graphics card may not have features to make flashing easier. For those situations a boot disk with the absolute minimum of TSR programs is the weapon of choice even if the disk has changed from a 3.5" floppy to a thumb drive. If you

It Slices, It Dices...

PC Audio has certainly taken a major downturn in importance for the majority of users, but Asus is still fighting the good fight by offering an extensive selection of quality sound cards. Today we look at the Xonar HDAV 1.3 Deluxe, and see what it can offer users willing to pay the steep price of entry into audiophile class PC audio.

Graphene is a rather neat material, a single layer of carbon in a honeycomb shaped crystalline lattice that has some very interesting properties. For instance the electrical properties are being eyed as a basis for a new transistor as electrons travel incredibly fast over a graphene lattice, rather close to the universal speed limit. Those transistors are a long ways off but there is another interesting property of graphene, its thermal conductivity is better than that of diamond, the current king of conductivity. We won't be seeing quite that impressive of a performan

If you passed over Ryan's peek at the upcoming ASUS Ares graphics card on the assumption it was just another overclocked HD5890, you missed out on something big. It is in fact a pair of true HD 5870 GPUs, both with a bit of an overclock bringing their cores up to 850MHz and each GPU gets a full 2GB of RAM to use. Now this extra power does have some side effects, the card is very large and requires not only two 8-pin power connectors but also a 6-pin as well. 28.4k on the GPU result in a quick run of 3DMark Vantage beats the

Apparently it took a pair of independent researchers discovering and reporting a fairly nasty and very unpatched flaw in Java for Oracle to even consider breaking their normal patch cycle. The Register reports on a flaw that can affect Windows and Linux based machines using the commands that Java Web Start will accept. Not every machine will be vulnerable thankfully, an ActiveX control known as Java Deployment Toolkit and a Firefox plugin known as NPAPI are two ways this flaw can be e

We've told you that Intel has no plans to release any new chipsets in 2010 but obviously they are eventually going to. Now, thanks to DigiTimes we know that some time in the first few months of 2011 we will finally see the 6 series of chipsets arriving. The details on what these new chipsets will bring is rather sparse though we did get some information on the naming scheme and the fact that Intel sees themselves still producing the i3, i5 and i7 series of chips along with the Core i7 Extreme series.
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If you've owned pets, small children or drunken roommates, then at least you can blame any broken speaker cones on someone other than yourself. That has limited success as a tactic and you can be guaranteed that asking the aforementioned to fix the damage that they might or might not have caused will not be at all effective. OCMODSHOP offers a process that will work, step by step instructions to re-edge your speakers something that needs to be done of you are going to replace damaged cones. It is not as

At the extreme end of density and savings lie the 2TB platter based hard drives and at the extreme end of storage speed you find SSDs. The middle ground, where the price matters somewhat and performance matters somewhat has been WD's VelociRaptor line up. Not exactly the cheapest drives and not as fast as the SSDs but for most the series has represented the best of both worlds. The line up has been getting a little elderly and we finally have a refresh to the line up with two new drives, a 450GB and 600GB. The speed is still there and the price is even better,

You can get your fill of Digital Video Recorder pr0n at Engadget this morning with SnapStream's rather impressive beast. Able to record 50 shows all at once and with over 100TB of storage this recorder to end all recorders should be able to grab more TV than you could ever possibly keep up with. Five separate rack-mounted SnapStream DVRs
are strung together in technically intricate manner and housed in a enclosure that looks a tad larger than your average